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Campaign Educating Youth About Manufacturing.

Education Experience 

officials and manufacturers are working together to educate students about high-demand careers in skilled labor.

This week, a local council of manufacturers teamed with the Campaign County Family YMCA to hold the first Inventors Camp, which teaches children more about skilled trades. The camp culminated at the Campaign County Fair Friday as young students toured the Ohio Hi-Point Career Center Fab Lab and showed off their inventions to manufacturers.

Hi-Point’s Fab Lab shows students different industrial tools such as a CNC router and a 3-D printer. The council also has a showcase table in the Mercantile Building, allowing companies to present their work to residents, said Marcia Bailey, economic development director for the Campaign Economic Partnership.

Campaign County saw a roughly 23 percent increase in manufacturing jobs between 2011 and 2013, but a lack of skilled workers has made it tough to fill those positions, officials say. Nationally, more than 3.5 million manufacturing jobs will be needed over the next 10 years, but as many as 2 million may go unfilled due to the ongoing skills gap, according to a recent study from Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute.

Hi-Point and Triad High School recently formed a partnership to create a manufacturing program, which will teach courses such as basic manufacturing principles, welding and robotics. The program already has about 80 students enrolled, Bailey said.

The YMCA program is reaching an even younger group of students, ages 6 through 13, Bailey said. The key is teaching children and their families about the technology involved, she added.
“These careers exist in your own backyard, plus you can get further training, go further into the companies,” Bailey said.

The effort is needed for the future, said Jill O’Neal, Human Resource and Safety Manager at Urbana-based Weidmann Electrical Technology, Inc., which produces insulation materials for electrical transformers. The company has had trouble recently filling skilled labor positions, O’Neal said.

“It’s definitely a challenge,” she said. “It gets harder and harder every day.”
Students typically want to pursue four-year degrees rather than a skilled trade, O’Neal said. But statistics show that within 10 years over 50 percent of the Campaign County workforce will be unqualified to fill the skilled trade gap.

“We’re trying to get ahead of that now and get students aware of opportunities at junior high and high school,” she said. “Hopefully, they’ll be available within four to six years.”

Students’ participation in activities like the YMCA Inventors Camp will only improve that effort, O’Neal said. Honda has had success with a similar model in Union County, she added.

“There’s some proof behind it already (at Honda),” O’Neal said. “We’d like to jump on it an be a part of it.”

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